The irony of Break, Blow, Burn is that Paglia, the great defender of art against ideology and against tendentious multicultural agendas, drags just about every poem in this book--from Shakespeare's sonnets to Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock," a poem of sorts--into the realm of noisy, issue-driven debate. No wonder Auden is inexcusably absent from this slim selection. He famously wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen." Paglia, by contrast, seems to think of poetry as a higher form of punditry, exhorting poets to "remember their calling and take stage again." But she's confusing her fantasy of poetry's purpose with her own purpose in publishing this book, which is to re-create the kind of controversy that made her a celebrity. Nearly all the poems she's chosen are sonnets or lyric poems. Neither sonnets nor lyric poems are meant to speak for their era. Few poets feel obligated to do so in any form.

But Paglia has to make her poets sound as big, world-historical and urgent as she herself aspires to be. One consequence of this willfulness is to make Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley sound like The McLaughlin Group. The other is to offer horrible, bombastic misreadings of the poems Paglia has chosen. Shelley's "Ozymandias," about the broken ruins of a tyrant's monument to his power, "wipes out history and humanity in a godless apocalypse that prefigures modern nihilism." Cool. But in fact, Shelley was an optimist who wrote poems suffused with faith in human progress. That's not a matter of perspective but a verifiable biographical fact borne out by everything Shelley ever wrote. "Ozymandias" is about the vanity of power, especially abusive power. That nothing remains, in the sands of time, of the "sneer of cold command" on the dictator's sculpted face is cause for hope, not nihilistic despair.

In her quest for relevance and urgency (an impulse she oddly shares with the student radicals she once berated for wanting to read contemporary black authors instead of "dead white males"), Paglia loads onto her readings the kind of submarine-sandwich-like Big Ideas with which college freshmen pad the final-exam essays they never studied for. In Break, Blow, Burn, these are often the same ideas applied to very different poets. William Carlos Williams's tiny gem "The Red Wheelbarrow," she says, "represents a stable agrarian society that was already slipping away when the poem was written." Theodore Roethke's "Cuttings" "is a regrounding of modern English poetry in lost agrarian universals." Wordsworth was responding to "the go-go commercialism of industrial England." Decades later, and across the ocean, Whitman was responding to "a go-go era of industrialization." From the farm to the factory--going, going...go-go!

With Yeats's "Leda and the Swan," Paglia outdoes herself. This stunningly powerful but small lyric poem--its subject is Zeus's violation and impregnation of a mortal girl to whom he appears in the form of a swan--"can justifiably be considered the greatest poem of the twentieth century." If that's not enough to make you never want to read it, Paglia projects onto Yeats her own pundit ambitions. She makes him sound like an editorial writer. "In Yeats' version [of the myth], womanizing is not a titillating sport but a ruthless expression of the will to power." But Yeats describes the omnipotent swan in exalted terms: His phallus is a "feathered glory"; his aspect a "white rush"; the poet wonders whether the girl can feel "the strange heart beating."

Could Paglia, the great scourge of feminist literature professors, be trying to attract precisely their constituency, who, after all, are committed buyers of books that speak to their political concerns? Or is she simply appealing to the masses of easily titillated college kids: "male swans (cobs) do have a small retractable penis." Titillation is one of Paglia's trustiest tools. Consider the passage she reproduces from Hamlet, in which Hamlet's father's ghost describes his murder at the hands of his brother, Claudius--a passage that Paglia includes as a self-contained poem, in this way confusing a poem's complete consciousness with a playwright's contrivance of consciousness in the form of character. For Paglia, what's really going on between the ghost and his treacherous sibling is an incestuous "male-on-male rape." Paglia likes to kick up a stir with the word "rape." John Donne believed, she proclaims, that "we will never be pure until we are abducted and raped by God." In Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" the "worms" that the poet imagines will accost his beloved when she is dead and buried are, in Paglia's reading, "gang rapists."

There is a sort of ingenious pandering in this book, a pandering alarmism. It's on flagrant display not just in Paglia's crudely forced sexual analogies, or in her post-9/11 lingo (in "To His Coy Mistress" "the poet turns terrorist"). It's in the way she keeps comparing her poems to movies as if to a higher mode of creative expression, thus reassuring readers that not only can they relax about their lack of interest in poetry, they can also stop feeling guilty about spending more time in front of the tube or the silver screen than with a "great" poem. For Paglia, it seems that the ultimate praise for the poems she's chosen is that they are either precursors to film, or film-like. "Shakespeare's mobile eye prefigures the camera." Shakespeare's "Gothic" style "would in turn engender modern horror films." Marvell's poem is "a vivid, cinematic fantasy." "Ozymandias" is "prophetically cinematic." (But, then, Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 is "prophetically avant-garde.") Not only that, but "Shelley's technique resembles that of the motion picture camera." Yeats's "Second Coming" has an "effect...as cinematic as a silent film," and its conclusion is a "horror movie finale." Plath's "Daddy" "is a rollicking nursery rhyme recast as a horror movie."

To invoke two other writers from the past, Paglia used to come on like Byron; now she is like some cynical version of Dickens's Oliver Twist, trampling on her very own standards, stooping as low as she can go in order to get a second helping of attention from the public that has forgotten her. But bullies always end up being reduced to their inner weakling. It's called poetic justice.

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